Winter of the Grebes
For a while this season, PWC turned into “Grebe Town.” Western and Clark’s Grebes filled the treatment room, carriers, drying pens, seabird room, and outdoor pools. Admitted by the dozens, all were dehydrated, most emaciated and weak, and many storm-tossed or oiled—usually due to natural seep from the ocean floor. Some had crash-landed on parking lots, presumably mistaking the wet surface for a lake or pond.
In a wildlife rehabilitation setting, these birds need to be handled with care. For humans, the dangerous end of a Western or Clark’s Grebe is the pointy end. With a scissors-sharp bill and long, flexible neck, a distressed grebe strikes fast, aiming for a person’s eyes. Rehabilitators know to wear eye protection, employ decisive action in controlling the neck when scooping a bird out of a pool, and expect the bird’s ear-piercing screech of displeasure.
Debilitated grebes need labor-intensive care. Those who are self-feeding need their fish inflated so the fish float in the pool and appear more alive and enticing. Those who aren’t eating need to be tube-fed fish slurry. Oiled birds need an even higher level of care: first the wash—a precise procedure requiring skill and expertise—followed by time in a soft net-bottomed drying pen until the bird proves able to preen and keep the feathers perfectly aligned and waterproof.
Because these birds do not touch ground in the wild—and are unable to stand upright for more than a few seconds, with legs positioned far back on their bodies—they need special protection in the drying pen. “Booties” (cotton socks for human babies) protect their feet from lesions that would soon appear from contact with the net-bottomed pen. And “donuts” (soft, U-shaped cushions) protect their sternum from these devastating sores.
After time in the drying pen, a grebe graduates to a small indoor pool and then, when waterproof and self-feeding, to an outdoor pool. The bird is still checked regularly for both waterproofing and weight before being cleared for PWC’s ultimate goal: release back to business as usual in the wild—swimming, flying, diving, courting, and parenting the next generation.
With their pointed beaks and short wings, these carnivorous water birds are aggressive hunters. Unlike many other aquatic birds, healthy grebes in the wild never touch land. Their natural habitat is water. Much of the year, they can be seen floating in the bay or ocean and diving like underwater jet planes for fish. They spend the rest of the year on lakes—among them our Santa Margarita Lake and Whale Rock Reservoir— where they perform an astonishing aquatic courtship ritual. (See YouTube video on BBC Life: The Grebes, Episode 1.) They then build floating nests of soft vegetation and spend the summer raising chicks, who charm onlookers by riding around on a parent’s back.
If grebes are found on solid ground, it’s because they are injured or sick.
